quotations about death
Brief and powerless is man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Philosophical Essays
Death cannot touch the higher consciousness of man ... it can only separate those who love each other so far as their lower vehicles are concerned; the man living on earth, blinded by matter, feels separated from those who have passed onwards, but ... there is no such thing as Death at all.
ANNIE WOOD BESANT
Death--and After
Death is progress, advance, disimprisonment.
REUEN THOMAS
Thoughts for the Thoughtful
Death is when the monsters get you.
STEPHEN KING
Salem's Lot
Death--a stopping of impressions through the senses, and of the pulling of the cords of motion, and of the ways of thought, and of service to the flesh.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
Of all the Gods, Death only craves not gifts:
Nor sacrifice, nor yet drink-offering poured
Avails; no altars hath he, nor is soothed
By hymns of praise. From him alone of all
The powers of Heaven Persuasion holds aloof.
AESCHYLUS
fragment
Pale Death with impartial tread beats at the poor man's cottage door and at the palaces of kings.
HORACE
attributed, The Quotable Intellectual
Science regards man as an aggregation of atoms temporarily united by a mysterious force called the life-principle. To the materialist the only difference between a living and a dead body is, that in the one case that force is active, in the other latent. When it is extinct or entirely latent, the molecules obey a superior attraction, which draws them asunder and scatters them through space. This dispersion must be death, if it is possible to conceive such a thing as death where the very molecules of the dead body manifest an intense vital energy.
HELENA PETROVNA BLAVATSKY
Isis Unveiled
Taunting Death ... means pitting oneself against a wily enemy who cannot lose.
J. K. ROWLING
The Tales of Beedle the Bard
That is the gods' work, spinning threads of death
through the lives of mortal men,
an all to make a song for those to come.
HOMER
The Odyssey
The dead body makes the living one obscene. It's why we close the eyes, too. The dead shouldn't have to look on the lewd aliveness of things.
GLEN DUNCAN
By Blood We Live
The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced. Every other wound we seek to heal - every other affliction to forget; but this wound we consider it a duty to keep open - this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude.
WASHINGTON IRVING
"The Rural Funeral"
We're ever making plans for life,
But seldom plans for death,
Though death we know must come to us,
And life is but a breath.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
Thoughts
What is
Death, so it be but glorious? 'Tis a sunset;
And mortals may be happy to resemble
The Gods but in decay.
LORD BYRON
Sardanapalus
About the presence of death and dying I don't remember the society in the 1950s being so skittish as it has since become. People still died at home, among relatives and friends, often in the care of a family physician. Death was still to be seen sitting in the parlor, hanging in a butcher shop, sometimes lying in the street.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
"Momento Mori", Lapham's Quarterly: Death, fall 2013
Death comes black and hard, rushing down on me from the future, with no possible chance of escape.
DAVID GERROLD
The Man Who Folded Himself
Death is always and under all circumstances a tragedy, for if it is not, then it means that life itself has become one.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
letter to Cecil Spring-Rice, Mar. 12, 1900
Death's gang is bigger and tougher than anyone else's. Always has been and always will be. Death's the man.
MICHAEL MARSHALL
The Upright Man
Death
As a dark Shadow
Beckons his prey
Into the unknown
By a soft whisper
In the soul
CINDY CHENEY
"Death"
How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
Suttree